In my last post, I wrote about the need for consistent high-speed connections in schools, accessible from anywhere on campus. That is half of the issue. The other half is the dinosaur in the room that nobody really has an answer for: the :”old” and the “ancient” computers that exist in schools all across the nation. “Old” would be a machine that is maybe 5 years old. “Ancient” is anything prior to that. A high speed connection does nothing when run through an older computer, no matter what make it is. For some things, a current iteration of computer doesn’t really matter. When teaching young children about computers and how to navigate through various programs, as long as they are older programs, an older computer works just fine. Once one leaves the basics of how to use a computer, old becomes impossible. The reasons? Newly written programs are graphically very intense and need speed and memory to work at all. Newly adopted curricula, at least in the state of California, comes with online components, for students and teachers. They also require a speedy chip and lots of memory, along with high-speed access, in order to be used by students and teachers. Without a computer that is up to todays standards, all the bandwidth in the world does no good. It is much like travelling a 4 lane freeway at a comfortable speed, thinking that you will arrive at your destination on time and happy, and then finding that the 4 lanes abruptly shrink to 1 lane. You won’t be on time, or happy by the time you do get there, much later than you could ever have imagined. Once again it is likely that the children in class have better computers at home than exist in schools, unless the children live in a high poverty area, and they know what is possible. The school district generally isn’t able to replace all the computers in school on a regular basis. It is very likely that there isn’t even a line item in the budget for such a thing. In business, when it comes time to replace the hardware, it simply gets done, as it has been planned for and probably written down to the point that it has to be replaced. School districts simply don’t have the ability to generate funds–we are not profit driven entities. We get paid by the state for the number of children enrolled, and present. Any other funding we receive is from grants, bake sales, and begging. Being fiscally conservative helps. We do get lucky from time to time when big corporations or community foundations, or individuals, offer funding for technology. Absent additional funding, schools tend to use computers and related equiptment until they fall apart. We get a lot of miles out of our computers. What we need, in addition to a national committment for universal high-speed access, is a national committment to providing computers that are capable of using that speed to its fullest. With the global nature of commerce and education running on computers, desktop, laptop, handheld, it seems to make sense to equip our schools and children with the necessary tools to compete, from Kindergarten through graduate school. We haven’t seen any concrete evidence of such a committment for quite some time now. What we have seen is a lot of UFM’s (unfunded mandates). More of that would be extreemly disappointing. Joe Stafura writes about education being an exclusionary device. Certainly, a weak national committment to proper technolgy funding can be seen as such. A change, and concurrent funding, would be good, and perhaps, inclusionary. As always, time will tell.